Manage your subscription

Beyond the splits

6 November 1999

Darwin was a clumper, with his great unifying theory. After him came the
splitters, biologists whose specialisms became ever narrower in the face of an
explosion of ideas and information. Thus geneticists in America were largely
ignorant of the ideas of the European taxonomists. In 1942 Ernst Mayr wrote
Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist
which, read with Theodosius Dobzhansky’s work on adaptation and speciation,
knits the strands of specialism to produce modern evolutionary biology. Mayr has
added a new introduction to his classic work. Published by Harvard University
Press, &dollar;17.95/&dollar;10.95, ISBN 0674862503